Analysis of the Inner Flow in the Wave Energy Converter WaveTube

Abstract: Wave energy technology is currently growing and gaining popularity. With around 100 separate technologies researched globally in over 25 countries wave energy are believed to soon be able to compete with other renewable sources such as wind energy. One of the new technologies is WaveTube; a wave energy converter currently under development and in need of technical verification. The basic idea of WaveTube is a partially submerged container with an enclosed fresh water volume. The kinetic energy of the ocean waves are transferred onto the floating container, creating an inner flow in the structure and electricity is generated as the fresh water flows through turbines. Previous small-scale model tests have confirmed the basic idea of WaveTube and an inherent continuation is visualizing and evaluating the inner flow using Computational Fluid Dynamics. A simplified 2D simulation where the WaveTube structure is subject to a pure sinusoidal, rotational motion was believed to be able to give useful information about the inner flow field. However, this Master Thesis project shows that a simulation using ANSYS Fluent of this case is not a successful approach. With inner moving parts a so called dynamic mesh was required, which updates the mesh as the boundaries move. In order for this method to be successful the mesh needs to be of high quality. However, for the complex geometry that WaveTube is no mesh was found to meet the requirements and the calculations using the Volume of Fluid method were not able to proceed.